Charles Bonnet began his career as a naturalist, from an early age establishing a reputation as a careful observer. It is for those youthful observations, as well as for some suggestive speculations proposed relative to this field, that he is best remembered in English-speaking countries: regarding the taxonomic de mands of natural history he refurbished the idea of a chain of beings; regarding the question of generation he marshaled evidence in support of preforma tion theory; and regarding the analysis of the physiology of the nervous system he advanced a theory that individual nerve fibers receive and retain specific sensations. Following his loss of eyesight in his mid-twenties Bonnet entered a more reflective period, turning to philosophy and pondering the nature of human understanding - considerations he had formerly disdained, but that now seemed a natural outgrowth of his reflections on nature. This essay focuses on the philosophical and psychological works of the later period, the period in which he wrote all his major books. By giving these writings a broader exposure it has been one of my hopes that Bonnet's audience would also be broadened, releasing him, so to speak, from the charge of historians of science so that he might fmd his way, in general books on the "Enlightenment," from scattered footnotes into the texts themselves."

This book provides a chronological introduction to modern atomic theory, which represented an attempt to reconcile the ancient doctrine of atomism with careful experiments-performed during the 19th century-on the flow of heat through substances and across empty space. Included herein are selections from classic texts such as Carnot's Reflection on the Motive Power of Fire, Clausius' Mechanical Theory of Heat, Rutherford's Nuclear Constitution of Atoms, Planck's Atomic Theory of Matter and Heisenberg's Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory. Each chapter begins with a short introduction followed by a reading selection. Carefully crafted study questions draw out key points in the text and focus the reader's attention on the author's methods, analysis and conclusions. Numerical and laboratory exercises at the end of each chapter test the reader's ability to understand and apply key concepts from the text. Heat, Radiation and Quanta is the last of four volumes in A Student's Guide through the Great Physics Texts. The book comes from a four-semester undergraduate physics curriculum designed to encourage a critical and circumspect approach to natural science while at the same time preparing students for advanced coursework in physics. This book is particularly suitable as a college-level textbook for students of the natural sciences, history or philosophy. It might also serve as a textbook for advanced high-school or home-schooled students, or as a thematically-organized source-book for scholars and motivated lay-readers. In studying the classic scientific texts included herein, the reader will be drawn toward a lifetime of contemplation.

Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

This book presents new insights into Freud's famous "discovery" of the unconscious and the subsequent development of psychoanalytic theories. The authors explore the original context in which these ideas arose and the central debate about mind as matter or something that transcends matter. In the course of this examination, it is demonstrated that Freud was influenced not only by the 19th century scientific milieu, but also by ancient cultures. While it is known that Freud was an avid collector of ancient artifacts and generally interested in these older cultures, this book systematically investigates their profound effect on his thinking and theorizing. Two major influences, Egyptian mythology and Jewish mysticism are analyzed in terms of similarities to Freud's emerging ideas about the mind and its diseases. To further this line of investigation, Bakan supplies an illuminating discussion of what it means to interpret. Taken from the viewpoint that interpretation involves an u

A four volume overview of the different sciences. This is volume 2.

Traces of Ink. Experiences of Philology and Replication is a collection of original papers exploring the textual and material aspects of inks and ink-making in a number of premodern cultures (Babylonia, the Graeco-Roman world, the Syriac milieu and the Arabo-Islamic tradition). The volume proposes a fresh and interdisciplinary approach to the study of technical traditions, in which new results can be achieved thanks to the close collaboration between philologists and scientists. Replication represents a crucial meeting point between these two parties: a properly edited text informs the experts in the laboratory who, in turn, may shed light on many aspects of the text by recreating the material reality behind it. Contributors are: Miriam Blanco Cesteros, Michele Cammarosano, Claudia Colini, Vincenzo Damiani, Sara Fani, Matteo Martelli, Ira Rabin, Lucia Raggetti, and Katja Weirauch.

A comprehensive historical review of the debates surrounding women's contributions and roles in science, with emphasis on women's access to education, training, and professional careers. This remarkable work illuminates the debates surrounding women's involvement with science throughout history, covering a broad range of disciplines. Unlike a biographical compendium of great scientists, it examines the question posed throughout history: Are women capable of doing science? Whether people have the right to even ask the question is germane to the debate itself. The coverage discusses Hypatia, the first female scientist about whom we have information; examines the contradictory behavior of the church in the treatment of women during the medieval era; and covers the 17th century debates over women's education. It examines women physicians, discusses feminism and science, and delves into why there are so few women in science-even today. The debate that began during the time of Plato and Aristotle continues to this day. Each chapter features a central theme or controversy, such as the Querelle des Femmes, the professionalization of science, and the exclusion of women from medicine Includes a bibliography of primary and secondary sources divided into subsections based on topic, a complete subject index, and illustrations of the major female figures throughout the history of science

In his study of Romantic naturalists and early environmentalists, Dewey W. Hall asserts that William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson were transatlantic literary figures who were both influenced by the English naturalist Gilbert White. In Part 1, Hall examines evidence that as Romantic naturalists interested in meteorology, Wordsworth and Emerson engaged in proto-environmental activity that drew attention to the potential consequences of the locomotive's incursion into Windermere and Concord. In Part 2, Hall suggests that Wordsworth and Emerson shaped the early environmental movement through their work as poets-turned-naturalists, arguing that Wordsworth influenced Octavia Hill's contribution to the founding of the United Kingdom's National Trust in 1895, while Emerson inspired John Muir to spearhead the United States' National Parks movement in 1890. Hall's book traces the connection from White as a naturalist-turned-poet to Muir as the quintessential early environmental activist who camped in Yosemite with President Theodore Roosevelt. Throughout, Hall raises concerns about the growth of industrialization to make a persuasive case for literature's importance to the rise of environmentalism.

This book is the final outcome of two projects. My first project was to publish a set of texts written by Schrodinger at the beginning of the 1950's for his seminars and lectures at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These almost completely forgotten texts contained important insights into the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and they provided several ideas which were missing or elusively expressed in SchrOdinger's published papers and books of the same period. However, they were likely to be misinterpreted out of their context. The problem was that current scholarship could not help very much the reader of these writings to figure out their significance. The few available studies about SchrOdinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics are generally excellent, but almost entirely restricted to the initial period 1925-1927. Very little work has been done on Schrodinger's late views on the theory he contributed to create and develop. The generally accepted view is that he never really recovered from his interpretative failure of 1926-1927, and that his late reflections (during the 1950's) are little more than an expression of his rising nostalgia for the lost ideal of picturing the world, not to say for some favourite traditional picture. But the content and style of Schrodinger's texts of the 1950's do not agree at all with this melancholic appraisal; they rather set the stage for a thorough renewal of accepted representations. In order to elucidate this paradox, I adopted several strategies.

This work counters historiographies that search for the origins of modern science within the experimental practices of Europe 's first scientific institutions, such as the Cimento. It proposes that we should look beyond the experimental rhetoric found in published works, to find that the Cimento academicians were participants in a culture of natural philosophical theorising that existed throughout Europe.

This book offers a comprehensive study of the views of ancient philosophers on mental disorders. Relying on the original Greek and Latin textual sources, the author describes and analyses how the ancient philosophers explained mental illness and its symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, strange fears and inappropriate moods and how they accounted for the respective roles of body and mind in such disorders. Also considered are ethical questions relating to mental illness, approaches to treatment and the position of mentally ill people in societies of the times.

The volume opens with a historical overview that examines ancient medical accounts of mental illness, from Hippocrates' famous Sacred Disease to late antiquity medical authors. Separate chapters interpret in detail the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Galen and the Stoics and a final chapter summarises the views of various strains of Scepticism, the Epicurean school and the Middle and Neo-Platonists.

Offering an important and useful contribution to the study of ancient philosophy, psychology and medicine. This volume sheds new light on the history of mental illness and presents a new angle on ancient philosophical psychology.

When Columbus first returned to Spain from the Caribbean, he dazzled King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella with exotic parrots, tropical flowers, and bits of gold. Inspired by the promise of riches, countless seafarers poured out of the Iberian Peninsula and wider Europe in search of spices, treasure, and land. Many returned with strange tales of the New World.

Curiosity began to percolate through Europe as the New World s people, animals, and plants ruptured prior assumptions about the biblical description of creation. The Church, long fearful of challenges to its authority, could no longer suppress the mantra Dare to know

Noblemen began collecting cabinets of curiosities; soon others went from collecting to examining natural objects with fresh eyes. Observation led to experiments; competing conclusions triggered debates. The foundations for the natural sciences were laid as questions became more multifaceted and answers became more complex. Carl Linneaus developed a classification system and sent students around the globe looking for specimens. Museums, botanical gardens, and philosophical societies turned their attention to nature. National governments undertook explorations of the Pacific.

Eminent historian Joyce Appleby vividly recounts the explorers triumphs and mishaps, including Magellan s violent death in the Philippines; the miserable trek of the new Argonauts across the Andes on their mission to determine the true shape of the earth; and how two brilliant scientists, Alexander Humboldt and Charles Darwin, traveled to the Americas for evidence to confirm their hypotheses about the earth and its inhabitants. Drawing on detailed eyewitness accounts, Appleby also tells of the turmoil created in the all societies touched by the explorations.

This sweeping, global story imbues the Age of Discovery with fresh meaning, elegantly charting its stimulation of the natural sciences, which ultimately propelled Western Europe toward modernity."

This is the first comprehensive biography of a major, but neglected, figure of his age. John Theophilus Desaguliers made his mark on the eighteenth century in several diverse ways. He was an assistant to Sir Isaac Newton and later elucidated the difficult concepts of Newtonian physics in private lectures. He was a member of the Royal Society, and was presented with the Society's highest honour, the Copley Medal, no less than three times. He was a pioneering engineer: the water supply of Edinburgh, the ventilation of the Houses of Parliament and the first Westminster Bridge all owed him a debt. In a different sphere, Desaguliers became the third Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons which was founded in 1717. He is remembered worldwide for his seminal influence during those early days of Freemasonry. He also wrote poetry and had an influential circle of patrons, including George I and Frederick, Prince of Wales (whom he initiated as a Mason at a specially convened lodge at Kew). This biography, based on original research, describes a charismatic character who was a major figure of his age.

twentieth-century literature about the distinction between explanation and und- standing)? Second, can we do justice to a particular writer's notion of that category by taking at face value what he writes about his own motivation for adopting it? In response to both types of questions, there is by now a consensus amongst many historians of science and of philosophy that (a) intellectual history - like other kinds of history - has to be careful not to uncritically adopt actors' categories, and (b) more generally, even the actors' own thinking about a particular issue has to be contextualized vis-a-vis their other intellectual commitments and interests, as well as the complex conditions that make the totality of their commitments possible. Such conditions include cognitive as well as practical, institutional, and cultural factors. The articles in this volume respond to these challenges in several ways. For example, one author (Christopher Pincock) seeks to read some of the nineteen- century philosophical writings about Erklaren and Verstehen as standing for a more fundamental problem, which he terms the problem of the "unity of experience.""

The articles in this collection were all selected from the first five volumes of the Journal of Dialectics of Nature published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences between 1979 and 1985. The Journal was established in 1979 as a comprehensive theoretical publication concerning the history, philosophy and sociology of the natural sciences. It began publication as a response to China's reform, particularly the policy of opening to the outside world. Chinese scholars began to undertake distinctive, original research in these fields. This collection provides a cross-section of their efforts during the initial phase. To enable western scholars to understand the historical process of this change in Chinese academics, Yu Guangyuan's On the Emancipation of the Mind' and Xu Liangying's Essay on the Role of Science and Democracy in Society' have been included in this collection. Three of the papers included on the philosophy of science are discussions of philosophical issues in cosmology and biology by scientists themselves. The remaining four are written by philosophers of science and discuss information and cognition, homeostasis and Chinese traditional medicine, the I Ching (Yi Jing) and mathematics, etc. Papers have been selected on the history of both classical and modern science and technology, the most distinctive of which are macro-comparisons of the development of science in China and the west. Some papers discuss the issue of the demarcation of periods in the history of science, the history of ancient Chinese mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy, machinery, medicine, etc. Others discuss the history of modern physics and biology, the history of historiography of science in China and thehistory of regional development of Chinese science and technology. Also included are biographies of three post-eighteenth-century Chinese scholars, Li Shanlan (1811-1882), Hua Hengfang (1833&endash;1902), and Cai Yuanpei (1868&endash;1940), who contributed greatly to the introduction of western science and scholarship to China. In addition, three short papers have been included introducing the interactions between Chinese scholars and three great western scientists, Niels Bohr, Norbert Wiener, and Robert A. Millikan.

In this book of reminiscences, this prize-winning Russian physicist presents a sweeping discourse on scientific achievement from the thirties to the present day. On the basis of his own work and that of leading international scientists such as P. L. Kapitza, L. Landau, R. Feynman and J. Bardeen, the author recounts the establishment and development of the superfluidity of liquid helium and quantum hydrodynamics. In an interesting and readable style, E. L. Andronikashvili speaks of the scientific quest and the human interrelationships that accompany scientific creativity. For historians of science and physicists.

and less as the emanation unden\'ent radioactive decay, and it became motion less after about 30 seconds. Since this process was occurring very rapidly, Hahn and Sackur marked the position of the pointer on a scale with pencil marks. As a timing device they used a metronome that beat out intervals of approximately 1. 3 seconds. This simple method enabled them to determine that the half-life of the emanations of actinium and emanium were the same. Although Giesel's measurements had been more precise than Debierne's, the name of actinium was retained since Debierne had made the discovery first. Hahn now returned to his sample of barium chloride. He soon conjectured that the radium-enriched preparations must harbor another radioactive sub stance. The liquids resulting from fractional crystallization, which were sup posed to contain radium only, produced two kinds of emanation. One was the long-lived emanation of radium, the other had a short life similar to the emanation produced by thorium. Hahn tried to separate this substance by adding some iron to the solutions that should have been free of radium, but to no avail. Later the reason for his failure became apparent. The element that emitted the thorium emanation was constantly replenished by the ele ment believed to be radium. Hahn succeeded in enriching a preparation until it was more than 100,000 times as intensive in its radiation as the same quantity of thorium."

The holy grail of theoretical physics is to find the theory of everything that combines all the forces of nature, including gravity. This book addresses the question: how far are we from such discovery? Over the last few decades, multiple roads to finding a quantum theory of gravity have been proposed but no obvious description of nature has emerged in this domain. What is to be made of this situation? This volume probes the state-of-the art in this daunting quest of theoretical physics by collecting critical interviews with nearly forty leading theorists in this field. These broad-ranging conversations give important insights and candid opinions on the various approaches to quantum gravity, including string theory, loop quantum gravity, causal set theory and asymptotic safety. This unique, readable overview provides a gateway into cutting edge research for students and others who wish to engage with the open problem of quantum gravity.

From the Preface: "This book was written for the active reader. The first part consists of problems, frequently preceded by definitions and motivation, and sometimes followed by corollaries and historical remarks... The second part, a very short one, consists of hints... The third part, the longest, consists of solutions: proofs, answers, or contructions, depending on the nature of the problem....

This is not an introduction to Hilbert space theory. Some knowledge of that subject is a prerequisite: at the very least, a study of the elements of Hilbert space theory should proceed concurrently with the reading of this book."

Sinceits founding by Jacques Waardenburg in 1971, Religion and Reason has been a leading forum for contributions on theories, theoretical issues and agendas related to the phenomenon and the study of religion. Topics include (among others) category formation, comparison, ethnophilosophy, hermeneutics, methodology, myth, phenomenology, philosophy of science, scientific atheism, structuralism, and theories of religion. From time to time the series publishes volumes that map the state of the art and the history of the discipline.

Here, for the first time, is a single volume in English that contains all the important historical essays Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944) published during WWII on the emergence of modern science. It also contains one previously unpublished essay and an extended version of an essay published earlier. This volume is unique in its well-articulated social perspective on the origins of modern science and is of major interest to students in early modern social history/history of science, professional philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science.

This encyclopedia explores historical and contemporary fringe remedies seen as strange, ridiculous, or even gruesome by modern Western medicine but which nevertheless played an important role in the history of medicine. From placing leeches on the neck to treat a cough to using crocodile dung to prevent pregnancy, a number of medical treatments that now seem unusual were once commonplace. While a few of these remedies may have been effective, most were either useless or actually counterproductive to good health. Even today, there are alternative and fringe treatments considered bizarre by mainstream medicine yet used by hundreds of thousands of people. Bizarre Medicine: Unusual Treatments and Practices through the Ages offers a fascinating look into the history of medicine. Entries are organized by disease or medical condition and explore the folk and traditional "cures" used to treat them. Explanations are provided for why some treatments may have worked and why others may have done more harm than good. In addition, entries provide a clear description of the causes, symptoms, and current treatment options for each condition based on current scientific understanding. Each entry also discusses the condition's enduring impact on society and the arts. An introductory essay creates a robust conceptual framework for readers, allowing them to better understand the entries that follow Entries not only explore unusual treatments but also provide a clear explanation of how the medical condition is understood and addressed today and how it has impacted society through the ages A glossary defines terms that may be unfamiliar to readers An extensive back-of-book bibliography serves as a gateway to further research and study

To attempt to compile a relatively complete bibliography of the theory of functions of a real variable with the requisite bibliographical data, to enumer ate the names of the mathematicians who have studied this subject, exhibit their fundamental results, and also include the most essential biographical data about them, to conduct an inventory of the concepts and methods that have been and continue to be applied in the theory of functions of a real variable ... in short, to carry out anyone of these projects with appropriate completeness would require a separate book involving a corresponding amount of work. For that reason the word essays occurs in the title of the present work, allowing some freedom in the selection of material. In justification of this selection, it is reasonable to try to characterize to some degree the subject to whose history these essays are devoted. The truth of the matter is that this is a hopeless enterprise if one requires such a characterization to be exhaustively complete and concise. No living subject can be given a final definition without provoking some objections, usually serious ones. But if we make no such claims, a characterization is possible; and if the first essay of the present book appears unconvincing to anyone, the reason is the personal fault of the author, and not the objective necessity of the attempt."